Tips, tricks & manuals for site owners on HIE

Holiday mode

It is that time of the year again… putting your webshop in holiday mode is a FAQ.
There is no single button to get this done, and depending on your wishes there are several methods to get your WooCommerce shop into holiday mode.
You can just put up a notice that you are on holiday on top of your shop, and add a note in the footer of the automatic mail that is send out when people order, this is just 2 steps, and will leave all listings available (good to retain Google ranking).
There is also the option to get all items out of stock for the period, you can leave them all visible, but there will be no buy-button. This might be confusing for visitors though, and people may not return.

Method 1: Putting up a notice on top of your shop

Your Shop page is working like any other WordPress page, and you can edit this page, add text text and images, which will appear at the top of your page before your products.

When logged in to your site, go to the shop page, and press Edit Page on top.

You will see an empty page, this is normal, the products you see on your site are generated automatically. Just make sure you are editing the page called ‘Shop’, and not a product.
You can just start typing as on any other page, and update.
The text should now appear on top.

Adding a notice on the automatic mails send out on new orders

If people came to a product directly instead of visiting your full shop page first they will not see above notice, so it might be best to also add a note under the automatic sent mails on orders.

To add a delivery or holiday note to the automatic mails visit WooCommerce Settings, and go to the tab Emails. Under the Email options you’ll see a field ‘Email Footer text’, you can type your message here to notify your customer that the product will be shipped on return.

Method 2: Bulk edit all products to remove them from stock temporarily

If you do not want your products to be available in your holiday period, but still want to show them, you can temporarily remove them all from your stock at once using the Bulk Edit method.

You can verify if your Out-Of-Stock products are showing under WooCommerce-Settings – Products – Inventory. The Out Of Stock Visibility field should be Unchecked.

To quickly remove all products from stock you can use the bulk Edit.

For this you go to all Products (just click on ‘Products’ under WooCommerce on your dashboard). With All selected Use the dropdown for Bulk Edit, Select Edit, and press Apply.

The top now has all items listed under Bulk Edit, scroll down to the ‘In Stock’, select ‘Out of Stock’ from the drop-down, and save.

Now all items will still show on your site so the search engines will still find you, but will not have a buy button until you change the stock options again.
This might not always work, e.g. for variable items there is a problem when you use the bulk edit for price or sale changes, but for all unique items this works fine.

I recommend the first method though, to just put up a holiday announcment, and leave the rest as it is.